A random game of the week. Each week the mods (via suggestions) choose a game from a more obscure league/part of the world and designate that The Game Of The Week in the sidebar. The community then all watch and discuss that match. This will give fans of obscure teams the chance to talk about their league, broaden our collective knowledge of world football, be a great change of pace from the big matches, and allow us the opportunity to actually talk football rather than the jokes, stories and drama that litter /r/soccer.

Can I suggest starting it with Bristol City v Bristol Rovers in the JPT on Wednesday? First Bristol derby since 2007 where sadly Rickie Lambert (who else?) scored this GOAL. Game is on sky so you should be able to get a stream of it!

Definitely just start with this, but in the future I wouldn't mind a Games of the Week round up, encouraging a match thread for each. List the important games or derbies happening around the world in the week, or the games likely to be entertaining. Through most popular avenues you just don't hear about Boca vs River Plate, a popular has-been playing for his boyhood club, the Melbourne derby or just any other random game that would absolutely be more entertaining than your average games like the five 0-0's in the EPL right now.

And, if people aren't making Match Threads for the smaller games, how about just a EPL Saturday Match Day Thread and a La Liga Match Day Thread, etc.

Two days ago there was a really good article on slate about how Messi and Neymar will coexist at Barca, and how Messi represents Laporta's era, and Neymar Rossel's. It was submitted twice, and both times it was downvoted heavily, I suspect because it was a pretty long article. Less and less lengthy articles reach the front page as more users join.

Its a natural consequence of size. More and more casuals (Major backpacker moment here) get involved so less in depth content is downvoted and more 'Lol Gifs', 'Classy' and 'Ibratelli' gets upvotes as its easier to consume.

/r/nba does a Free Talk Friday discussion thread where people can discuss whatever they want. I really enjoy it, but /r/nba feels like a closer-knit community than /r/soccer so I'm not sure if it'd work here or not, although it'd be cool to see it tried.

But having a Miami Heat flair in /r/nba is worse than having an Arsenal one on /r/soccer. They automatically downvote you and just look over anything you say all the meanwhile calling you a bandwagoner.

Videos/GIF submission voting aren't based on what game they came from, they are voted on and highlighted based on the content.

The downside with the approach of creating a thread for each match is that you go from having:

Ribery goal

Torres goal

Toure goal

Some Newcastle United goal

Some goal from Serie B

Some goal from MLS

to:

GIFs: Bayern v Chelsea

GIFs: City vs Hull

GIFs: Newcastle v Fulham

... 100 posts later ..

GIFs: Levante v Deportivo la Caruna

You just replace the GIF/video posts with a post for each game, and nobody is going to bother to click through each post to find the highlights. You need to be able to let users score or appreciate every highlight.

A lot of these games don't even get match threads, so to force people to create a GIF thread or post-match thread for each game just to submit one GIF would be silly and contrived.

You also lose the ability of being able to view the video directly in the sub page rather than having to click through and play (if you aren't using Reddit Enhancement Suite you should be)

You need to have a way for users to vote on which goals or highlights are best. That all gets lost when you start aggregating things.

We had GIF threads in the past - one or two would get posted and then they would die out. The current GIF threads serve a purpose of being a good place to break up post-game discussion. Contrast this to the GIF thread of last week where it was simply a list of 80+ GIFs and then 30-40 comments and not a whole lot going on:

There is also a large expectation here from visitors that a soccer subreddit would contain video and highlights from soccer matches (I know, crazy - right). There is a reason why a lot of these submissions get over a thousand upvotes.

Lots of ppl complain, but there isn't really any "other" content on weekends during match days. 95% of football media is focused on the matches during weekends and on match days. We took samples over the last few weekends and there weren't any breakout stories that were buried in 40th spot because videos were holding them down. On the contrary there were actually big stories that got voted up and were up amongst the video submissions.

You can't force people to artificially like smaller leagues more, that just goes against everything reddit is about (although highlighting smaller leagues, as the idea further down the thread suggests, is a good idea. We had something similar with 'subreddit of the week') .

The best thing would be to encourage people to downvote highlights that aren't that great. Replacing submissions that link directly to a video with a thread that would then just link to many more less interesting videos doesn't really solve much.

The mods have talked about this, a lot, and for a long time and run through a lot of the permutations. If anybody has any new ideas to bring to the topic, feel free to send them to us.

edit: and while we are on the topic, please don't abuse the reporting system by reporting video threads just because you don't like them. It creates work for moderators and that is what downvotes are for.

The problem I have with single video/GIF submissions is a lot of times you just get a jumbled mess of highlights with no real context to the events going on. I feel post match threads for videos/GIFs would solve this since it would allow for the highlights to be placed in order as well as give users who didn't watch the match a better feel for what happened in it.

I agree with your point that a lot of lower leagues games and how people shouldn't have to make a post match thread just to post one GIF, but I think this could be solved by having a stickied lower league GIF thread.

I really would like to see this. More than this actually I would like to see the gif submissions deleted that don't go in there. On Saturdays this place is just clogged up with Man Utd (my club) gifs and it pushes everything else out

I understand this place needs to cater to a large audience, but at 150k subscribers it's time to stop pandering and clean it up a bit.

To be fair though, what else is there? These days the transfer window's open so we've got stories about rumors and signings etc, but once it closes it'll just be match threads and gifs again, aside from the occasional article about a player doing coke or some punditry.

I noticed specifically with /r/LiverpoolFC so perhaps I shouldn't have generalized. I can think of a handful of usernames that used to comment a lot but had different opinions and no longer post there, but I still see them on /r/soccer

I would rather see the non important gifs downvoted on the front page. I don't think anyone would like to go through all those posts to check if there have been any amazing goals/weird shit/bad tackles etc.

I understand that (for example) the game yesterday didn't need 4 goal gifs, one tackle and one Neuer header on the front page. But the tackle was an important thing in this game and a really bad mistake from Ramires and the ref, it deserved front page. The other Gifs weren't that important and could have been put in the match thread only.

The problem is that the upvote/downvote system doesn't work. Because people are idiots. And the bigger the sub gets the more the moronic contingent rules the day. I understand that is reddit treason but it is true. Just look to /r/atheism for how moronic things can get without proper maintenance and standards.

What do the mods want, the biggest sub possible or the best sub possible?

It isn't as simple as that though. People like to see the gifs, but there is no "I liked being able to see this gif, but I would have preferred it be placed into a gif thread" button. Saying that because the gifs make it to the front page means people like the gifs, yes, but doesn't say anything about how they would prefer gifs be placed on a single thread. Downvoting the gif posts won't cause them to be moved to another thread, it will mean that people no longer submit gifs at all.

People like to see memes/images as well, even novely accounts, all are banned and rightly so.

Reddit is not a democracy its a mob. It needs rules and giving gifs a free reign is not the way to go.
If people want a highlight checking website, they should check footytube, rsoccer's primary function is not to provide highlight reels to people.

Technically it does sometimes, but so do certain memes(which are based on football bases) and other content sometimes.

gifs/multimedia are complementary, i.e. they ought to add to the site not take up primary space and cannibalize other aspects(and here the primary aspect is being short changed), and that is the problem.

Its not like gifs have suddenly appeared out of nowhere, they were here last season and the season last to that.

But at no point during the last 2 years was this situation as it is now where sometimes the top 10 will have 4 traditional links, and top 6 are gifs, with 1000+ upvotes and a possibly only 1 of those threads having comments which run in high 100's (which is hardly the sort which backs up the discussion claim).

gifs are easy view content, watch, vote and move on, and this what it facilitates and creates and propogates such a sub-culture.

The balance is broken. And it will only get worse as the subscriber count increase, this is a trend unless a proper compromise is had.

I love every single gif that I see on the front page. Just because I don't comment on it doesn't mean I'm not talking about it with my friends. I love r/soccer for discussion threads and to be able to quickly see the best headlines of the day, such as that crazy diving header by neuer

We've actually had a lot of discussion of this, both publicly and in modmail. There's a lot of problems, though. One is the subjectivity of which goals genuinely do deserve their own threads. Another is that we're not always on here - more so when there's actually games going on - and if a goal's already made the frontpage and/or generated some discussion, it isn't really right to remove it.

I think the mods in general agree that this is one issue we need to work something out for.

I dont know. While yes it is annoying to see Gifs all over the front page, it would be kind of ridiculous to basically neatly organize every post into basically a "Match Folder" because every post is probably related to a single match. Its really not that bad most of the time, theres a Gif here and there and then theres self-posts thrown in between.

People give too much credit to foreign tabloids when it comes to rumours. Most of these [Rumour]s are just as fictional as anything in the Daily Star, yet they seem to get upvoted all the time and treated as gospel truth.

Find a way to limit over-asked questions, perhaps with a second menu like some subs have, that shows obvious questions (I don't know if that would help).

A smarter design: sidebar that shows our top leagues or at least links to sites which constantly update them. Some of the club subs do this really nicely.

Helpful content (such as the transfer docs, spreadsheets that users create) finding more prominence on the site.

Bendtner, Bebe, Arsenal war chest, everyone hates Barca, Altidore, Liverpool's TYIOY... a mention of these should auto-ban a user for a week (I'd currently be banned for a month using this system but it would be worth it).

There is nothing we can do about downvoting of comments, that is just how reddit is. I suggest that you set your reddit to show all comments and not worry as much about where your comment ends up in the order.

The experience from subreddits (and general design experience) is that crowded sidebars create blind spots for users. You wouldn't believe the number of times we get messaged about stuff that is in the sidebar. The less stuff there is there the more people notice it, which is why we intentionally keep the sidebar as trim as possible

The FAQ is now part of the wiki and we encourage people to add content to it and edit it.

"Helpful content" that you describe is some of the most upvoted content on this site:

The problem with your last point is the now very rapid expansion of this sub. I joined just over 2 years ago, when it was ~30,000 subscribers, now we're around 175,000. The new people will make the same jokes we all have in the past, get a temp ban, and then not come back.

That would be a good thing in some cases, but we do get new subscribers who post good, informative content. "Downvote, and move on".

I think it was you that created a topic a few weeks back collecting content from the smaller leagues in here, I really liked the idea and it seemed to get a decent amount of traction. Shame it didn't catch on.

Edit: to be clear this is a statement of fact. Currently 60,911 users have flair assigned and the top team is Arsenal with 5802 user sporting their badge. That's around 9.5%, meaning that the most popular team is likely hated to varying degrees by approximately 90.5% of other users.

I'd like to see some sort of filtering for submissions. This transfer window (exceptional in many ways) just shows how much crap journalists will spew, and we should have some sort of blacklist that flags unreliable sources when posted.

In /r/reddevils we have a little orange box saying "Unreliable" before the title of articles from the Daily Mail, or goal.com (as well as others). Doing the same here, and perhaps even an option in the side bar to automatically not show those posts would be very nice to see.

The problem there is that even the shit sources have something useful to say occasionally. On /r/LiverpoolFC there's an automatic deletion of stuff from The S-n and the Daily Mail, and while I can't imagine the former would have anything to say that we'd want to hear, right now there's a DM column by Jamie Carragher about Fernando Torres that's appearing as "( )" on the sub due to the source. I like the "Unreliable" tag option though; gives a warning before you give the page views, at least.

Seems a bit presumptuous. Don't get me wrong I know people dislike the Daily Mail and certain aspects of their site practice the dark arts of link baiting. But they do have legitimate sports journalists working for them who are well respected and well informed within the industry. Not everything they say is unreliable.

But that's the thing, it's not the pub. The mods aren't offended by slurs, etc., we're just tasked with making this place all-inclusive. Nobody gets banned for swearing, just for being persistently abusive or crossing certain lines (like racial or homophobic slurs) and even those bans can be lifted if promise not to do it again. This place is for news, discussion and conversation, it's not meant to replace having friends in real life.

I'd love to see downvotes removed entirely, even though I know it's not possible. It's a little ridiculous when relevant content about the Portuguese league gets downvoted just because it's not a joke about Arsenal's warchest or Dortmund's class.

Nobody is obligated to upvote that stuff but I've posted a few really good goals before from the Portuguese league that gathered quite a few downvotes and unfortunately didn't make it to the front page. Meanwhile Neuer heading a ball does.

edit: And that's the bigger point about downvotes, it's a shame when perfectly good points get downvoted just because they don't fit the narrative of this sub. The way this sub downvotes dissenting opinions is a sure fire way to spread ignorance, I've seen so many posts from users with flairs relevant to the question at hand being down voted just because their opinion is at odds with the prevailing opinion of Premiership fans of "player x being shit" or "club y being corrupt". It's a shame because one of the most interesting aspects of this sub is the sheer heterogeneity of users and the insight that I've gained into the leagues that I'd otherwise know little about.

I was a prime example of getting rid of the sheep voting when the rule of hidden votes was applied to this sub-reddit.

I made a comment about enjoying other teams playing while I support Chelsea myself and ended up with two controversial comments gathering 92 upvotes and 99 downvotes on my first one and 120 upvotes 100 downvotes on my second one.

Absolutely. When I first started with this account I made a comment about a certain goalkeeper (recent reports have mentioned what I said) and was about -80 points. Took ages before I could get back into submitting at a regular timeframe.

Same with recent comments over the transfer window, even when I asked for people to explain why I was wrong and for the emost part just got blind downvotes - like a pack of sheep clicking a button without even thinking about it.

yeah you're either gonna get downvoted or someone is gonna make an ad hominem based on your crest: "HAH that's pretty rich coming from someone who supports a club that bought X and Y" when it's not related at all to what was initially discussed

I don't like how the mods usually ignore the latin-american leagues. They use to put a new banner pic of the team who just won the league but when teams from America (not counting the USA in this sentence) won the league they usually don't care.

Maybe I'm just saying this because when my team won the league they did nothing about, but I think they can give a little more attention to those leagues in general :(

I was surprised as well that there wasn't a banner for C.F. America. The match thread was one of the top posts, had a bunch of comments(showing it was watched by quite a bit of people), and was an amazing game overall for the championship of arguably the best league in North America.

Agree completely. Hadn't really followed a lot of the Latin leagues but after the Brazilian league primer (which were badass for my knowledge level) I watched a lot of their games and would love at least a little more coverage. Everyone wants to see all of Neymars stuff. Well the Neymars are playing and are really fun to watch and follow.

(For clarity I'm mostly on alien blue so the sidebar stuff doesn't really show so no clue what's happening over there)

I did not know that negative karma affected the time you have to wait between comments.

It does if you're a new user, but that must be to prevent trolls from causing a riot. I suppose if you have been here for a year or so it could still affect you but you would have to do a lot of posts to get yourself into the negative.

If /u/SharkinaShark is talking about the negative karma on the single comments, then I don't believe this is true as I have receive a lot of negatives last year when defending my club. I did not have a posting limit applied to my account.

It was amazing during the experiment though. Posts that we see nuked to -75 still had -10 or so, while easy karma posts that we see at +300 were around +100. It had a remarkable impact on bandwagon voting, and I was extremely disappointed when the community voted that they wanted the old state of affairs back.

I think that in an online forum, giving everyone a vote is a poor system, since people who contriubute no conversation or content have the same voting power as someone who is an important part of the community.

I really enjoy some of the formatting changes /r/hockey made a few months ago, but particularly the header menu that includes links to: relevant subs, posting guidelines, stickies to general info resources, and - especially helpful - content filters from which you can choose to selectively browse game threads/only discussion threads/memes/etc.

I was sad to see that /u/TopsyTukle (via /r/soccercirclejerk) was banned because he was one of the most entertaining and different personalities on here and never failed to bring a fresh perspective. Aggression and insult are an essential part of football I think. This place needs more people like him, not less.

I'd like to see a separate subreddit for match threads. Sometimes when there's a lot of stuff going on (transfers, gifs, news) match threads are a bit hard to find. Having them all in one spot would make it easy and convenient.

Also, the lack of crest flair could save a few people from getting downvoted into oblivion after a heated match, though some are deserving of their downvotes of course...

The problem is if you try to contribute to a discussion about a club without a flair you get downvoted and if you try to contribute with a flair of a "wrong club" or a rival you get downvoted. I admit that I'm pretty much a lurker but national team flairs are the safest ones when considering the value of an opinion.

ps. not sure if my opinion came out right since I'm not a native english speaker, but I'll try to clarify if it's necessary.

A lot of Americans support different leagues. You'd just have a lot of EPL crests and La Liga crests. At least for me a league crest would send the message, "I watch this league" so when some random Spurs fan tells me all I need to know about Heereveen I can disregard their comments and carry on with my life. Or when American's tell me about how good Jozy Altidore does over sea's. I'm sure they were watching AZ every week.

I suppose. Truth be told if you want a proper football forum you'd be better off looking at smaller alternatives across the web. /r/soccer has its positives (large user base, some knowledgable posters and Reddit's format) but in reality a large amount of the posts are either cliches, arguments or people using FM/FIFA to pretend they know what they're talking about.

I don't understand why there has to be 5 new Bale rumor articles a day. Perhaps a player with a transfer saga like this one should have his own transfer saga thread and all new articles will be posted there. The front page is always loaded with Bale, we know he's leaving so idk why people still post articles day in day out

Often I come to r/soccer and am slightly disappointed to see the front page dominated by either transfer rumours or a GIF. of a goal someone scored. It's often the case the they are upvoted in favour of interesting articles and stories with real substance. However, I think this is a problem with reddit in general, not just r/soccer.

I thought the comment was actually pretty mild to be honest. And /u/yhgvb - a very good and sensible poster - took it a face value and responded like wise. He wasn't shit talking. A bit rude alright though.

More appreciation shown to the mods. If you spend much time on the 'new' tab, you see so many re-posts/pointless posts/downright offensive posts - and the mods do a great job of tidying them up and keeping the sub functioning. It can't be easy being a mod in such a large, and at times vicious, sub - and these guys put time in for free and get nothing but hate back.

There has to be a better way to organize match threads. Maybe we could put all of the threads from a competition each week together, like "all threads from Champions League group stage, match day 4 can be found here" or "all threads from La Liga week 23 can be found here." Something like that. I think if this were done properly it could make the whole thing much more organized.